psychologywikiaorg-20200213-history
Talk:Truth theory
''This article is stolen property. It is plagiarized and does not cite the original authors.'' At the bottom of the article page is a claim that the article originated from Wikipedia. A link claims to point to a Wikimedia Foundation publication titled "Truth theory" but instead points to an article published by the foundation titled "Truth". An effort to navigate past Wikimedia Foundation's attempts to steer Internet traffic leads to the page where attribution to the charitable donors who wrote this article should be found. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Truth_theory&action=history. Instead of the truth about who really wrote the article, we find there but one lone entry, attributing the article vandalized and destroyed by Wikimedia Foundation to the very Wikimedia Foundation administrator who vandalized and destroyed the donation. I don't know how the original authors of this article feel about having their work first vandalized and destroyed by the Wikimedia Foundation, then stolen for publication by a for-profit company. Wikia, Inc. hosts and collects advertising revenues from this "psychology wiki." The product Wikia uses to generate advertising revenue includes this intellectual property donated to Wikimedia Foundation, destroyed by Wikimedia Foundation, then republished by a for-profit company owned by the president of Wikimedia Foundation. Screenname546 00:04, 3 February 2007 (UTC) :Hi Screenname. Thank you for raising these points it has been useful. Let me assure you that the article was copied over in good faith under the GNU Free Documentation License in May 2006 and at that time the list of authors of the work was available. You have brought to light a problem of what happens when the article is moved and or deleted by WP after being copied and the list of authors is apparently lost or becomes inaccessible. I will try and raise this with them. :At that point the article was not stolen or plagarized as it was obtained under the license. I believe the ability to share the text in this way opens up a powerful route to the development of knowledge structures that would not otherwise be possible. Here on this site we are attempting to develop a database for a whole science in a way that could not otherwise be acheived if we had to generate all the text from scratch. :You should be clear that from our perspective Wikia make a facility, that would cost many hundreds of thousands of pounds/dollars for our profession to recreate, available for free to both authors and readers. see here for some of our thinking. We have no connection with them financially but are enabled to pursue our academic aims freely and with integrity. Their financial model is an important advance over that of a book publisher who still charges the reader.Dr Joe Kiff 07:23, 3 February 2007 (UTC) ::Just to let you know that I have raised your concerns at the Wikia Forum. Thanks again for bringing the issue to our attention.Dr Joe Kiff 07:42, 3 February 2007 (UTC) :::Thank you for attending to the abuse that results to people's intellectual property when publications rely for content on Wikimedia Foundation and its anarchistic philosophy. Since you were so kind as to explain your reasoning, I will offer you additional benefit of my knowledge. It would not cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars to match the service you get free from Wikia, Inc. The software Wikia markets is available for free. It is not difficult to install or to modify. I suspect that many in your profession who are also interested in an author-pays model of publication would also be interested in configuring a preferred wiki software on a server under your complete control. :::Though you attempt to avoid financial entanglements with Wikia, you cannot while you have your wiki hosted by Wikia. Wikia collects advertising revenues based on your effort. As such, (though you have not claimed to be a true "author-pays" program") your project is neither a reader-pays nor an author-pays model -- it is a model subsidized by a private firm. You could escape the implications of the subsidy by operating your own wiki. A widely-read wiki such as yours can often cover server costs with ad revenues. What you would not get is the so-called support of Wikia, Inc. What you would gain would be control of your publication. Wikia offers professional expertise, but only toward a goal established by radicals at Wikipedia who are attempting to represent the "Wikia-pays" model of publication as the preimenant version of "author-pays" publication. As a result, you are not allowed to control who can edit your wiki. Wikia encourages their volunteer authors to follow the radical system of editorial management established at Wikipedia, where "vandal fighting" is a far more prominent editorial function than is verifying sources or assuring that content meets standards. :::I would encourage you to find a credible professional association interested in hosting your wiki, and interested in developing based on research appropriate management systems for online collaboration. With free software like MediaWiki, and the more mature version that allows responsible assignment of editorial permission -- GroupWiki -- you can easily establish your own wiki for little cost, but you also can break free of Wikia, Inc.'s demands about how you run your wiki site. Wikipedia's mob-centric management style has hurt thousands of people. Wikia made it a condition of service that users accept the badly flawed administrative model developed at Wikipedia. The mainstream of the psychology profession has not embraced a publication model that presumes all editorial controls can be set aside. What we see here at psychology wiki is not representative of a collective effort of working professionals - it is the work of a few outside the aegis of the profession. If you are genuinely interested in replacing the reader-pays model with an alternative source of high-quality information about the profession and the scicence, I recommend that you find a host that allows you true freedom to develop your editorial approach, instead of Wikia, Inc. which dictates as a non-negotiable term of service that you adopt their favorite, albeit radical and widely questioned, philosophy of editorial management.Screenname547 22:36, 3 February 2007 (UTC) ::::I offer these comments in an effort to assist, but they might not on first impression seem directly related to resolving plagiarism as now exists on this page. The matters are related. Solving this instance of plagiarism might easily be accomplished by asking a wikipedia administrator to provide the appropriate history pages associated with this article. Chances are, however, that effort would run against a pervasive tendency for Wikipedia admins to claim their ad hoc processes must be followed without exception "for the good of the project" and that a community decision to delete this article prohibits them from providing the page history, which would in effect overturn the decision to destroy it. On a case-by-case basis, Wikimedia Foundation's employees or corporate officers have at times agreed to resolve problems related to their volunteers' administration of the content the Foundation provides - often when a particular instance of a problem threatens to reveal a systematic flaw in the administration of Wikipedia. My comments here, as relate to this particular instance of plagiarism you were inadvertantly drawn into as a result of Wikimedia Foundation's failure of foresight, are to encourage you to look past the immediate requirements of resolving this instance of plagiarism to consider the implications of hitching your wagon to a private company that offers Web access and server space in exchange for you endorsing the problematic administrative models Wikia, Inc. and Wikimedia Foundation promote. Screenname547 22:59, 3 February 2007 (UTC) Hi. Again you raise important point. Let me take them in order. *It is clear to us that the support of the professional organisations will be important for the reasons you give. But I am not sure the answer is for any particular organisation to host it. The development of an international psychology, with a broad approach to knowledge means I think that the wiki needs to retain its independence. In our minds we position Wikia as a new form of academic publisher in a new medium and cherish the freedom this gives us. *I am not clear that it is an easy matter to set up a substantial wiki. Yes you can easily install the software on limited hardware but administrating it, housing it, staffing it, providing bandwidth, backup and geographical redundancy etc. We anticipate that we will have 1 million pages eventually and at that point WP was running off of over 50 servers. I am clear that the financial cost would be prohibitive for most professional organisations. *As I understand it Wikia are changing their policy and now accept password access on some of their wikis. Our intention is to build the knowlege structure with WP articles acting as placeholders so there is no need to be too restrictive with contributors. Later however, to gain the support of the wider profession we will need to manage editing more closely. Personally I have not found Wikia at all restrictive and feel that much of this will sort itself out with time. *I take your point that this is currently a somewhat left field operation, but as with so many innovations its the outsiders that can see what needs doing and can act freely. Once we have the basic knowledge structure in place: all the main areas in psychology covered; with all the main research areas seeded; with all the main research referenced; and the main workers on the database, the professional benefits will be apparent. Quality control, the proper appointment of experts to monitor fields etc can then follow. No doubt changes will need to be made. We are only the forerunners who see the great potential of this new way of organising our information *One of the admins on WP has offered to locate the list of contributors for this article and I have asked them to discuss with WP the development of a policy to preserve such records for substantive articles that are moved etc. This may be an ad hoc arrangemnt but at least it addresses your original issue. *We are mindful of the issues you raise but are reassured that if things do not work out amicably with Wikia and a viable sound alternative presents itself, it is as you say easy to move over. But at present we do not share your concerns about Wikias mode of operation. * We may not agree but I value the debate-and it stops us from getting lulled into complacency. Suppose we did restrict editing to qualified psychologists and won the approval of the main national societies, what objections would you still have? RegardsDr Joe Kiff 00:58, 4 February 2007 (UTC) Wikipedia page history See Truth theory/Wikipedia page history. Robin Patterson 01:45, 6 February 2007 (UTC) ::Hi Screename As you can see Robin has been able to access the record of contributors to the original article. I hope you feel that this is a reasonable response to your initial concerns. I would like to see a clearer policy at WP to make these records more easily accessible. If you come across other concerns in your use of the wiki please dont hesitate to contact me.Dr Joe Kiff 08:12, 6 February 2007 (UTC)